The primacy of a good ear

If you want to be a good musician, having a good ear–the ability to

understand what you hear and replicate it on your instrument, to
work out solos from records, to jam with other musicians in real
time–is essential.

Guthrie has met players who know every note of Steve Vai’s
Passion and Warfare album but can’t jam over a 12-bar blues.

Are you actually making music or simply performing the guitar

equivalent of typing a dictated letter?

Be precise about what you want out of guitar playing

However, some people have busy non-musical careers, have no

artistic pretensions, and no time or inclination to figure things out for
themselves. All they want is to got home after a long day at work
and be able to play their favorite songs. So for them, detailed
transcriptions and videos teaching songs are very helpful.

Not every guitar player has the time or inclination to send every
waking hour studying their instrument. You have to know exactly
what it is you’re aiming for so you can use your time more
productively.

Listen to everything

Try to learn from everything you hear rather than developing tunnel
vision by focusing too much on one player.

Don’t shun forms of music through prejudice. An aversion to heavy

metal, for instance, might well prevent someone from discovering
two-handed tapping, therefore missing out on a tool that can create
not only Van-Halen-esque histrionics but also some very distinctive
keyboard-like chord voicings. In contrast, a seasoned rock player
might be familiar with tapping techniques but have no knowledge of
the Eastern pentatonic scales that make Marty Friedman’s style so
distinctive. And if you listen to Michael Lee Firkins’ eponymous
debut album, you’ll hear a predominantly rock-based player using
his whammy bar to create country-tinged slide guitar effects rather
than the ubiquitous dive-bombs you’d expect to hear from a player
in his genre.

Listen voraciously to as much varied stuff as possible.

Keep a lick library

Keep a notebook of what you’re working on so you can capture

chord progressions and licks as they occur to you.

It’s worth honing your transcription skills so that you can keep a
permanent record of everything you learn.

Document individual licks rather than trawling through a whole solo

just for the sake of two bars you particularly like. Also write down
the context of each idea (i.e. what chord it works over) and come up
with variations of your own. Jazz players are particularly fond of the
idea of building up a “lick library”–they’ll categorize each idea in
terms of the scale it uses and the chords over which it would fit.

Transcribing tips

Start with the overall structure of a piece, mapping out the chord
progressions and figuring out how long each chord lasts in terms of
beats and bars.

If there’s a particularly difficult section you would start by notating

the general rhythmic outline and then marking the most prominent
notes (i.e. those that strike you as being particularly loud or those
that seem particularly high or low in pitch) and finally filling in the
gaps. If you think that all of the notes in a lick come from the same
scale, make a note of it.

Every time you listen to a passage, you should be focusing on a

particular note or group of notes; once you’ve heard the bit you’re
interested in, pause the music–anything you hear after that will only
distract you, blurring your mental snapshot of the notes you need to
know. In theory, you should be able to work out any lick using a
one-note-at-a-time approach. As your ear develops, you’ll be able to
assimilate the information in larger chunks.

Slowing things down is helpful, but when you’re trying to figure out
where a lick is played on the fretboard, it’s important to try the notes
in various positions on the neck in order to hear which strings best
reproduce the tone of the original and this is far easier to do when
you’re listening at the original speed.

With practice, you’ll be able to tell roughly which string is being

used for any given note. Failing that, try the lick in several positions
and determine which feels easiest–surprisingly often, this turns out
to be the correct one.

Record yourself

If you record your playing, you can listen back and make an honest,
objective appraisal of your strong and weak points. When you’re
actually playing, you don’t always interpret what’s coming out of
your amp in the same way that your audience might because you
have to concentrate on the mechanics of your playing as well as
listen to it.

Recording yourself also provides a good means of monitoring your

long-term progress. If you’re frustrated by, say, your picking hand’s
apparent lack of improvement, it can be quite enlightening to listen
back to what it sounded like six months ago or even a week ago.

Recording yourself can also help you to become less self-

conscious.

You can make your own backing tracks. If you’re trying to familiarize
yourself with the sound of a new scale, you can record a couple of
minutes of a rhythm track using an appropriate chord progression
and try out the notes over that backing track. You’ll learn a lot more
about the inherent sound of a scale if you hear it in context. It’ll
make your practice routine feel a lot more like “real” playing and it
helps to develop your understanding of how the various notes of a
scale sound against appropriate chords.

Get some kind of multi-track recorder or recording software

and focus on your ability to write tunes

This forces you to view your guitar playing as part of the music as
whole. The areas of your technique that you feel the need to work
on will be dictated by the demands of each piece of music your
write, so your playing will evolve in ways that complement your
musical ideas rather than float off into bizarre realms of technique
and theory that you might never need.

Finish things! Successfully writing one whole tune will be more

beneficial for your musicianship than writing 20 small chord
progressions and never bothering to link them together.

One of the key factors in a really effective bit of music is its

structure–the way in which different sections fit together and the
calculated use of devices like repetition and surprise. Once you
start thinking about these issues you’ll find yourself listening to
other people’s music with a slightly different agenda.

Technique
Care of your fingertips

Don’t play until your fingertips are so sore that it hurts to touch a
string. If you feel this kind of thing coming on, stop playing for a day
or so to give your fingertips time to recover.

The conventional way of protecting your fingertips is by dipping

them in surgical spirit, which should toughen them up quicker than
the old-fashioned just-keep-playing approach.
Don’t pick up a guitar immediately after your hands have been in
water.

Raising your action or increasing your string gauge increases the

amount of wear and tear suffered by your fingertips and means that
they have to toughen up to a new level of resilience. Transition
gradually. Even if you’ve been playing for years, jumping up from .
009 gauge strings to a set of .013s can play havoc with your hands.

Wipe your strings after playing. Old strings get rusty and abrasive.

Playing regularly is the best way to maintain your calluses, but if

you can’t, at least play a little acoustic. The cheaper and more
unplayable it is, the better, as playing a real dog of an instrument for
two minutes can keep your fingertips in shape as efficiently as
playing your favorite shred machine for an hour (Guthrie made up
that statistic, but you get the drift).

Don’t touch really hot things–you may not feel the heat because of
your calluses, but you will nonetheless get burned.

Avoiding tendon troubles

Don’t work your playing muscles and tendons too hard. Tendonitis
and carpal tunnel syndrome don’t just go away. If you suspect any
tendon crises in the making, however slight or irregular the
symptoms, seek medical advice and go easy on the playing until
you’ve gotten an experts option. Bear in mind that there’s a
difference between “good pain” and “bad pain:” what you should be
looking out for are irregular shooting pains or muscles locking up
and not doing what you tell them rather than the slight exhaustion in
your hands and forearms after a sensible practice routine.

Warm up before attempting anything too demanding so that your

muscles and tendons can stretch nicely. Technically demanding
playing feels easier and is less likely to cause you permanent
damage if you prepare for it first by running through a few simple
exercises, starting slowly and gradually building up speed.
All of this becomes even more important if your hands are cold.

Joe Satriani likes to put his elbows in hot water before he plays.
This might sound a little odd, but paying guitar actually uses a lot of
forearm muscles so it kind of makes sense.

Posture

Many playing-related aches and pains come from bad posture.

Playing should feel natural and comfortable. it it doesn’t your’e
doing it wrong!

In general, aim to keep your spine and wrists as straight as

possible.

Tone

Bad tone can be hugely detrimental to the way in which people

perceive your playing.

Amp settings that sound good on their own often don’t work in a
band contexts. Buckets of overdrive, for instance, might make your
fastest shredding licks easier to play when you’re in your bedroom
running through your practice routine, but if you use the same
settings at a gig, there’s a very real danger that no one will be able
to hear what you’re playing. Distortion adds a buzzy quality to your
tone, and when you’ve got a whole band playing behind you, this
buzziness can sometimes make it harder to distinguish the actual
pitch of each note. Also, high volume levels increase the risk of
feedback.

If you play with high volume, always turn down the guitar’s volume
knob when you’re not playing and keep a respectful distance form
the amp and be extra careful when muting strings not currently
being played. If you’re doing all of this and you still have feedback
problems, then it means you’re using way too much overdrive.
Two kinds of overdrive:
1. The kind generated by the pre-amp (the tone-shaping part of the
amp where the gain and tone controls live) and is characterized
by a fuzzy sound quality.
2. The kind generated by overdriving the power amp (the part of
the amp responsible for overall volume level, courtesy of the
Master Volume knob). This type of overdrive tends to sound
more musical–the guitar still feels responsive and you still get all
the sustain you could ask for, but the overall timbre is a lot
smoother with none of the fuzzy abrasiveness of pre-amp
distortion.

Valve amps are particularly prized for their power-amp distortion–

the harder you work a valve amp, the more it sings. To be fair, you
might actually prefer the sound of solid-state amplification if your
main priority is getting a crisp clean sound at high volume levels.
Let your ears decide.

Given that a decent amp sounds best when it’s working hard, it
makes sense to use an amp that kicks out a usable volume level
when cranked up in this way. If you bought the Amp of Doom and
never found the opportunity to turn it up properly, it would be about
as much use to you as a Ferrari in a traffic jam. There are many
situations when’re it’s worth considering a relatively low-powered
valve amp. In a gig setting, for instance, you’ll normally find that the
sandman is violently opposed to the idea of the guitar being too
loud onstage. This is because his job is to achieve a separate signal
for each instrument and the sound of a wall of Marshalls at full tilt
will affect every microphone on stage.

Remember, Jimmy Page used a tiny Fender Supro amp to record

the far-from-tiny guitar sounds you hear on the early Led Zeppelin
records.

EQ
Imagine a spectrum of sound, with the low rumbling stuff like kick
drum and bass at one end and the treblier components like cymbals
at the other.

As a guitarist, you should be looking for that part of the sonic

spectrum that the other musicians need the least, and you’ll find this
niche somewhere in the middle, so your best bet is to crank up your
amp’s mid-range. A mid-heave guitar can have an unpleasant
honky, nasal quality when you hear it on is own, and many bedroom
guitar players prefer a tone with relatively little mid range, but in a
band context, tones like that will come across and thin and weedy. If
you pump up the mids, your sound will cut through better without
drowning out your fellow band members.

If you want to make your solos cut through a little more in the
overall sound of a gig or recording session, dialing in a little extra
mid can be every bit as effective as turning up your volume, and
some guitars have switchable mid-boost circuitry for this very
purpose.

A couple of excretions to this are the clean, glassy funk sound you
often get on the pop records, where the guitar’s role is more about
providing a percussive effect than playing an upfront melody, and
“djent” style playing. That crunching, evil-sounding tone is often
described as scooped, which means that the bas and treble are
boosted while the mid-range is cut. Bear in mind that this tone
swallows up a lot of the frequencies normally reserved for the bass
player. Done properly, the bass/scooped guitar combination can
sound like one monstrously fat-sounding instrument, but it’s
something that works best in heavy, riff-based music. In most other
contexts, it’s more important to hear the bass distinctly.

Effects

Most of the factory presents on multi-effects units feature huge

washes of reverb and chorus, offensively loud delay and far too
much overdrive because the manufacturers known that their
prospective buyers will be trying out their units on their own in a
music shop. The more lavish the presets sound, the more
impressed the customer will be.

However, when you take your new multi-effects unit to its first band
rehearsal, you’ll normally find that you have to modify all of the
presets by reducing the amount of each effect.

Signal processing is a wonderful thing when used in moderation,

but too much of it and you’ll suffer a loss of clarity. If you drown your
guitar in effects, it’ll sound somehow more distant, as if the sound is
coming through the wall from the room next door.

No two buildings produce exactly the same sound, but every venue
has some kind of inherent reverb. Since the venue is providing
natural reverb at no additional charge, it seems logical to back off
the amount of artificial ambience generated by your rig.

Tone Controls

Don’t overlook the tonal variations you can coax from your guitars
by playing with the volume and tone controls. If you amp is on a
fairly clean setting, the volume knob pretty much does what it says,
but in a more overdriven context, the same knob affects not only the
volume but also the fatness of whats being played. The guitar
produces a thick tone when its turned all the way up, thinning out as
the volume is backed down. Turn the thing down nearly all the way
and you’ll find a perfectly usable clean tone with more bite and top
end than you could get form your amp’s clean channel. For a good
illustration of this, check out Van Halen’s clean tones. Many players
in the blues/rock field can happily get through a whole gig using a
one-channel amp, controlling their volume and overdrive levels from
the guitar itself.

This also applies when you’re using your amp’s clean channel.
Trying to get a clean tone simply by following the formula of
selecting your front hum bucker and turning off the overdrive can
result in an overly boomy sound that people are always keen to
blame on their gear. Backing down on the volume a couple of
notches can often thin things out effectively and eliminate that
boominess, so experiment.

It’s worth investigating the range of sounds you can get by rolling
down the tone in gradual increments. If you’re at all partial to Eric
Clapton’s “woman tone” or Robben Ford’s distinctively honky lead
sound, you’ll know what can be achieved in this way. Of course, if
you turn down the tone too much, you run the risk of sounding
much and indistinct, but you’ll normally find sweet spots somewhere
in the middle of the control’s range.

(Aside for Strats: You’ll find a nice approximation of the classic hum
bucking sound if you set your pickup selector witch to position 2 or
4 and roll down the middle pickups tone control. This will mix
together the sound of two pickups, with one providing the honk and
the other providing the more trebly stuff, resulting in a pleasing thick
yet defined tone.)

You won’t necessarily find one tone-control setting that serves all
your needs. If you’re using a lot of harmonics, you’ll want as much
treble as possible in your sound, but if you’re playing fast single-
note runs with a relatively clean tone, you’ll find that too much treble
can expose the weaknesses in your technique and that rolling off
the tone somehow helps to make your playing sound a little more
perfect, hence why jazz guys are so fond of turning their tone
controls down and why your Vai-esuqe scalar picked runs sound
smoother when you switch to your neck pickup.

Picks and Fingers

In general, creating a good tone really is all in the fingers.

Expand your tonal palette by learning to comfortably use your pick

at various angles. For example, If you pick with the plane of the pick
parallel to the strings, you’ll get a round, full tone, whereas if you
strike the string with the edge of the pick at a 45 degree angle, you
get a sharper tone and a more grinding attack.
Also consider what part of the string you’re picking. Picking near the
bridge gives a tinny, metallic sound, while the tone gets fuller and
warmer if you move closer to the neck. Also investigate what
happens when you pick over the fretboard–you’ll find some Zappa-
esque sounds there.

Playing fast becomes very difficult when you stray too far up
neckward, particularly if you favor light-gauge strings, as the tension
is looser there causing the strings to move further, which makes
them feel like rubber bands.

Jeff Beck plays entirely fingerstyle and gets a great range of tones.

Another option is hybrid picking, which isn’t just for country players.

Guitar Setup

Low action might make playing easier, but it doesn’t give the string
much room to vibrate, so your attempts to play loud notes will
sound constipated, while the more you raise your action, the bigger
the notes get. The only problem is that playing a guitar with a high
action hurts after a while, so you’ll need to find a compromise where
the notes ring out properly but you aren’t suffering unduly.

Similarly, light string gauges give you that effortless feeling when
played, but they also produce a weaker-sounding note partially
because there’s less metal moving through the pickup’s magnetic
field and partially because they lack the power to get the body of
the guitar vibrating properly. Fat strings not only sound better, they
break less and they’re easier to keep in tune, but the pain factor
rears its ugly head once again. As before, seek a compromise
between tone and comfort. If you trying going up a gauge, your
fingers will get used to it within a month or two and your tone will be
that little bit more authoritative.

String bending
Enlist the help of other fingers when bending whenever possible
(obviously not possible when bending with your index finger).

The trickiest bends are probably those with the pinky. If you try to
back up your pinky with your ring finger, you’ll find that the
difference in length between the two digits prevents them from
working together effectively. Instead, try supporting the bend with
your middle finger, tucking it under the near side of your ring finger.

Your fingers aren’t supposed to do all of the bending by themselves.

Once they can feel the tension of the string, they should lock in that
position and let your wrist take over. A twisting motion of the wrist,
pivoting off the thumb and forefinger side of your hand, will
effectively force your fingers to glide over the fretboard, taking the
string with them. All your digits have to do form this point is try not
to buckle when they feel the resistance of the string. As long as they
retain their grip on the note, the wrist will do the rest.

Classical position with arched fingers and your thumb low down at
the back of the neck makes it harder to bend. The baseball bat grip
is the best way of executing a big bend without hurting yourself.

If you’re on the lower strings and want to bend downwards towards

the floor, you need to curl your fingertip a little more so that part of it
is effectively on top of the string. If the string keeps slipping, you
probably need to fret the note with a different part of your fingertip.
Try one of the fleshier areas, slightly further away from the nail.

Neck radius: Hold up your guitar at eye level with the headstock
pointing away from you and the pickups facing the ceiling. As you
look down the line of the neck, you’ll notice that the fretboard is
cambered (i.e. it looks slightly convex) and the frets are curved
accordingly. The more curved the fretboard looks, the narrower its
radius. The term radius makes sense if you think of the fretboard as
a small section of a cylinder, rather than as a mere plank.

The camber of the neck is there to make life easier when you’re
playing things like barre chords. Unfortunately, this luxury comes at
a cost–as you bend the top E string towards the centre of a heavily
cambered fretboard, the action effectively gets lower. If your action
is low in the first place, your bends will be impaired by being
choked, which is what happens when the string actually comes into
contact with the higher frets and can no longer vibrate. This is why
most pointy heavy metal guitars have relatively flat fretboards
whereas 62 strats have a lot more camber–they were designed with
very different playing styles in mind. If you’re partial to a bit of wide
bending but can’t live without your low action, you need a
fingerboard with a wide radius or perhaps a compound radius,
where the curvature gets less pronounced as you move higher up
the neck.

The size of your frets can also make a huge difference to the whole
bending experience. Taller frets make it easier for you to get a
decent grip on the notes and this is particularly true when you’re
using heavy strings. Stevie Ray Vaughan’s frets were enormous.
The logical extension of this idea is to use a scalloped fingerboard,
where the wood between each pair of frets has actually been
scooped out so you don’t feel anything under your fingertips when
you play. It’s great for those violent bends, but many people find it
hard to get a simple chord sounding in tune on a scalloped guitar–
there’s not wood there to tell you if you’re squeezing the strings too
hard and things can also get problematic when the time comes for a
re-fret.

Exercise: take a scale or melody you already know and move the
entire fingering down a fret so that you have to bend every note up
by a semitone to make it sound in the original key.

Exercise: try “stepped” bends. For instance, take a note on the B

string and bend it up a semitone, hold it there for a moment and
then bend it up a further semitone. Hold this new pitch for a moment
and then let the string halfway down so that its pitch is once again a
semitone above that of the original unbent note. Hold it there for a
moment and then release it. If you use .010 gauge strings or lighter,
you can apply this to bends as wide as four or five frets. The
general principle is to visit every semitone en route so that the
result sounds like a chromatic scale rather than one big bend. This
exercise is of great benefit to the accuracy of your pitching.